Free extract: All our welfare – foreword by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, journalist and author, has written an impassioned foreword to Peter Beresford’s forthcoming book All our welfare and you can read the full extract of the book in full for free here!

Ours is an age of rage, miserliness, crudity and startling ignorance. Seventy years ago, although Britons were exhausted and depleted by barbarous world wars, they were generous, idealistic, hungry for education and collectivist. That past and our present didn’t just happen. Politics, policies and national conversations make, change and manipulate public attitudes, sometimes to prepare the ground for major ideological or economic remodelling.

After the two world wars, the poor and working classes would, in time, have wearily returned to the old, unjust status quo. In 1945, before this fatalism set in, while the wounds and horrifying memories were still fresh, the Labour government tapped into and drew on the nation’s anguish and insecurities as it embarked on reconstruction and radical change. The people were primed, made ready for the welfare state. It, was, in effect, a quiet, very British, revolution. Without the pain of war, without astute politicking there would have been no gain.

Margaret Thatcher’s counter revolution aimed to incapacitate this welfare state. Men and women, she believed, had obligations only to their own families. She wanted this nation to be like the USA, ultra competitive, avaricious, selfishly Darwinist. It took longer than…Read the full extract for free here

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